


No More Reasons Not To Fall

by hangingfire



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Archaeology, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Inuit Character, Misses Clause Challenge, Off-screen Character Death, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:00:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,854
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21862606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hangingfire/pseuds/hangingfire
Summary: A team of archaeologists and an exile meet on an island, a hundred and seventy years apart.
Relationships: Harry D. S. Goodsir & Lady Silence | Silna
Comments: 22
Kudos: 43
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	No More Reasons Not To Fall

**Author's Note:**

  * For [theravenwrites](https://archiveofourown.org/users/theravenwrites/gifts).



_Now_

Sometimes Rachel Porter lies awake at night, unable to sleep at the thought of the artifacts being lost to rising seas and melting permafrost. Some of the would-be optimists on her team—a crew of archaeologists from the U.S. and Canada—argue that maybe other artifacts will be uncovered by the changing winds and rivers, but even they don't sound completely convinced. Their work this summer on King William Island has a new, desperate taste of urgency.

They're on their way out to Erebus Bay when they meet a hunter from Gjoa Haven. He tells them about an old skull he'd found the day before in a gully he'd passed dozens of times in the past. There had been some unusual weather patterns over the last few years, and probably the wind and water had finally washed away the earth that had covered it for who knew how long. It isn't very far out of the way from their planned route, so Rachel reckons they can stop and take a look. There is, of course, the possibility of more recent foul play, in which case they'd call the authorities.

But Rachel can see at a glance that the skull is very old, and she thinks it must be a grave or someone who had met with misfortune and succumbed to the elements at least a century before. They set up their perimeter and carefully brush back the shale and the thin stuff that passes for soil in this part of King William Island. Soon they find the rest of the bones. Remains of caribou hide clothing. An _ulu_ with a bone handle and a chipped slate blade.

That's the first surprise. A male hunter would have had a _savik_ , a man's knife, not to mention other hunting gear.

This was a woman.

* * *

_Then_

Silna is not a hunter. She never would have been, regardless of her sex; as her father's only child, it was always known that she would eventually inherit his role as the speaker to the Tuunbaq.

But then the _qablunaat_ came, and that was all destroyed.

Because she is not a hunter—and because there is no longer a Tuunbaq to bring her a freshly killed seal—she will only survive as long as her supply of food lasts, unless someone takes pity on her. But there's no room for pity this year; all over Nunavut there are too few fish, caribou, or seals for generosity. And even if any families could spare a little food, it wouldn't matter. She lost the Tuunbaq. She has failed. This is the price.

She sets off north, for lack of anywhere else to go.

* * *

_Now_

It looks like a bone at first, but as Rachel cleans off the dirt, she discovers that it's a slender piece of walrus ivory, only a little bigger than a box of matches. A bear, she thinks, but it's a strange one—the neck is too long, the face flattened and squarish, and there's something about the tiny divots of the eyes that gives Rachel chills. They're almost human.

The team agrees that it probably has some kind of religious significance. Annie, an anthropology graduate student who was born in Iqaluit, won't touch it. We should put it back, she says. She says that it reminds her of old stories that her grandmother got from her own grandmother, of priests and the spirits that were their guardians or helpers. Taboo subjects. Grandmother would say, if we take that away from here, we're inviting misfortune upon ourselves.

One of the men tries to argue but Rachel shuts him down. We're trying to be respectful here, remember? she says. If Annie says it stays, it stays. Photograph it. We'll rebury it with the bones.

* * *

_Then_

Silna drags her sledge across the the rocks and she tells herself that she has no destination in mind. She will walk until she can't walk anymore, whenever and wherever that might be. When night falls, she makes a shelter with her caribou skins and her sledge. In the morning she eats a little dried fish, and she starts walking again.

She wears the amulet that her father carved for her next to her skin, even though it's useless now. It's a useful focus for her grief.

She's not going anywhere in particular, she thinks, and she's almost convinced herself of that when she sees the ragged remains of the mutineers' camp spread out across the rocks. Tattered canvas and frayed ropes, broken tent poles, empty crates. More barren than it had been when she'd passed through with the captain, somehow even more dead.

* * *

_Now_

Rachel is pretty certain that whoever this unfortunate woman was, she died alone. Perhaps she was an old woman who'd voluntarily left her family group so as not to burden them anymore. Or maybe she'd been cast out for some kind of crime. Or she'd gone off for reasons of her own that are impossible to know. It's clear she wasn't laid out in the traditional way; she was left curled on her side where she had fallen. And then by some unknown vagaries of weather, geography, and circumstance, the earth contrived to bury her.

You poor thing, Rachel thinks. She lays her hand across the brow of the skull, as if to do so would comfort the lonely woman across—what, a century, two? That's when she notices something smooth and metallic in the earth. Dull, blackened finish, Definitely not stone or bone.

She carefully extracts it. A knife—a European table knife, with a blade badly scraped in an apparent attempt to sharpen it. She brushes away the dirt and finds a monogram on the handle. _HDSG._

Oh my God! she exclaims so loudly that everyone comes running.

* * *

_Then_

In the middle of the camp, Silna finds his bones. The planks where Hickey's men laid him out have collapsed and the skeleton has been picked nearly clean by birds and foxes, the small bones scattered, but she knows it's him. It can't be anyone else. The skull stares up into the sky with its jaw hanging open; she remembers how every time he looked up at the _aqsarniit_ —the _aurora borealis_ , he called it—he would grin broadly with delight, and she feels something snap inside of her. She falls to her knees and picks up the skull with shaking hands, presses her cheek against the dome of the forehead the way she would have done if she'd greeted him again as a living man.

Her people do not bury the dead in the way the _qablunaat_ do, but she knows enough of their ways to decide that she will try to honour him in something like the right way. She gathers up as many of the bones as she can find and builds a cairn over them, and she uses two pieces of tent pole and some rope to make a _qablunaq_ cross. She wishes that she knew better what his people said over a body, what rituals they performed.

There's little at the camp that she can use. She finds a metal table knife in the ruins of one of the tents—a stupid blunt thing, but nevertheless, it's metal, and her people have learned to prize these leavings. She grinds the edge against a rock, and is dismayed at how soft the metal is. Still, she doesn't throw it away.

* * *

_Now_

The knife changes the entire complexion of the dig. If Rachel hadn't found it, they probably would have wrapped up shortly, re-interred the bones and artifacts and marked the site, and gone on their way to Erebus Bay. But everyone on her team can practically recite the muster rolls of the Franklin Expedition from memory and they all know that _HDSG_ is Henry "Harry" Duncan Spens Goodsir, Assistant Surgeon on board HMS _Erebus_.

Rachel's trying not to get her hopes up. Everyone knows that years of Discovery Service wrecks completely changed the resource economy of Nunavut in the nineteenth century, providing wood and metal where they'd been scarce to the point of nonexistence before. This woman could have gotten the knife from anywhere. At least they can narrow down the date of the site—obviously it's impossible that it predates 1845.

They go slowly now, clearing the earth from around the bones bit by bit. Annie makes the big discovery. She's so overwhelmed that she bursts into tears and can't speak, and when Rachel sees what she's found, her reaction is the same.

It's a brown oblong lump. The woman's body and her clothes had protected it from the elements when she lay down for her last sleep. The pages are stuck together and part of the leather cover is rotted away, but it is absolutely, unmistakably a book, and when they carefully pry open the front cover—they all know they should do it in safer conditions, but they can't not, it's too exciting, so just this once before they pack it away—they can see scratchy Victorian handwriting on the stained pages.

* * *

_Then_

She finds his book at the bottom of a crumbling wood and leather trunk—the little book he was always writing in. Inside there are drawings of fish, birds, whales, and seals. There are also the strange segmented creatures that she asked him about once, and he'd told her that they were tiny ocean things, smaller than a fingernail. She remembers him making symbols to represent the words she taught him: _ihigak_ , _aȓgak_. Foot, hands. She's startled to find a drawing of her, opposite a page dense with writing. She wishes she could read it.

Practically speaking, the book is useless, but it was his. She'll take it with her, to remember him. She pauses one last time at the cairn before she leaves the camp. All she can give him now is a blessing for his spirit, wherever a _qablunaq_ spirit goes.

She feels strangely lighter now. Not happy, exactly, but ready at last to face whatever fate lies ahead for her. She's left the captain safe, and she has made her peace with her friend. She'll make her way to the sea, she decides, as near as she can get to where her father was lost. Perhaps her father's spirit will be waiting there for her when her time comes—or he'll come to her wherever she is, if she doesn't make it that far. She'd like that.

She takes the ropes of her sledge over her shoulder and walks away.

* * *

_Now_

Porter, Rachel and Kogvik, Annie, et al. “Inuit Remains and Franklin Artifacts: An Unexpected Link” Arctic, vol. 90, no. 4, 2019, pp. 102–125.

> ABSTRACT
> 
> In 2018, a small site including human remains and other artifacts was found east of Erebus Bay on King William Island. Tooth and bone analysis indicates that the remains are those of an Inuit woman in her twenties, native to King William Island. Artifacts found at the site suggest that it dates from 1848-1850 and also offer tantalizing suggestions regarding the fate of the doomed Franklin Expedition of 1845.

**Author's Note:**

> The title comes from the track of the same name on Bvdub's album [The Art of Dying Alone](https://bvdub.bandcamp.com/album/the-art-of-dying-alone). I owe an enormous debt to [Inuktitut Tusaalanga](https://tusaalanga.ca/welcome-bienvenue) and to a wide variety of papers and books, including the Arctic Institute of North America's [Arctic](https://www.jstor.org/journal/arctic) journal. Thanks to Snickfic for the beta-read and of course, thanks to theravenwrites for their request.


End file.
